Sorry, I think we have a communication break down. Of course when I
say "watching" this article, I mean how many people have it on their
watch list, not how many people are reading it.
On 12/13/05, Sherool <jamydlan(a)online.no> wrote:
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:02:29 +0100, John Lee
<johnleemk(a)gawab.com> wrote:
Andrea Forte wrote:
Has it ever been suggested before that a simple
indicator of "how many
people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust
wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts
discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been
explored further.
Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for
performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be
to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view
(otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by
any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no
idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the
caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from
overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times.
Aside from that I don't think the feature would be overly usefull. The
best you can do is give a count of how many people have loaded the page
within the last X minutes, there is no way to actualy tell if anyone is
*actualy* viewing the page. I think a more meaningfull number would be the
number of active (insert a convenient definition of active here) users
have the page on theyr watchlist or something like that, but again you
can't stick that on the page itself with the caching eneabled, otherwise
it would only update every time someone edited the page (or did an
action=purge on it). Maybe it could be put in an asosiated special page,
kinda like Special:Whatlinkshere or some such though, they are not cached.
--
[[User:Sherool]]
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